Studying Hunger Journals, page 49
26
Five times angry.
27
And I dreamed I was daubing someone’s eyes, first with sticky cream, a glue, then with a rinse or water, but, when I got to the third eye I nearly put it out. It was a dangerous treatment. The eye seemed to disappear. She went to her doctor and came back, reporting he had said, something like, “Worse things could happen…” and so on.
28
The eye again, the eye naturally double, the double murder, how many times must I repeat this before it’s worth thirty dollars to me. Thirty dollars, three lovers. Are you looking for it, David? Who do you sleep with David? Do you sleep with book? It’s time it’s over, I sense, said in the house before, any house, pick a house, many houses, many eyes, many clear eyes, looking. Please clear my eyes and lead me into the corner of the room. Lean me against the wall, like doll and press against me. I want to be lucid, I want to be clear, want to think, nobody else much wants to, it’s like doing dishes, so why not let me, we’re odd that way, we, me and you, so why not let us, sleep and think, and wake and write, am I missing something, am I substituting hunger for food or fuck it. It’s been fifteen years, I don’t need it, I need creams and sherries, fine wines and small courses of food, once in a while and an occasional smoke. I need to live forever and promote this junk, I need time. I’m in the passive seat now, do it to me. Push me in the corner, I’ll stay there, I’ll even walk (up) the streets and pay my own rent, I’m in a peculiar mood, you look for themes, look for dances instead, mobilize me, drink me, eat me, synchronize me, spend the night, exorcize me, look for me, I’m present, I’m at bay, I’m a prince. They’re getting up upstairs, I have work to do, meet me, I don’t feel like any vision tonight.
29
I dream the eyes again and the feeling that you will never be able to refocus them. No dream, no dream, no dream, therefore I am not allowed to form syllables, two names of David catching habits from each other. No dream, no dream. Get me a cheeseburger, find me a fashion, I demand everything again. Look, good, he’s leaving in a strange way again. Look, there, he’s gone. What do you do with a lover in the day when you want to work. Walking on the street, I take out the pen, I have to take out the pen and tap it on my teeth, start looking in all the store windows to have connection with it as long as it’s there, loose or lapsed connection. I don’t wanna sit at any more readings or lectures and I don’t wanna teach or eat.
30
A religious science. Just the past doesn’t exist. No matter how long you sleep, etc., eat, etc. No religious present etc. Open the window, live alone. Half of November, all of December. Not too long. No secure. Save some money. Make that trip of the Amazon (somebody’s leaving their hour’s house, his or her house). And never deal with it again. Junkie. Beer wine and fortune-telling but no good lines. Keep it, keep it for good. Simenon’s alone. He was alone. He must’ve been alone. He had to have been alone. No more beer wine or fortune-telling. I worry about it (my self).
31
Do dolphins throw up in the sea, does water make them choke, does the conjunction of thoughts that enters me, like precious sentences, sentences to be preserved from Max and Bill, does it distract me so much like the presence of the sun, 13 hours ago was absent. I realize I’ve not done the syntax enough. Sun is hiding or going behind the vein. You’re way behind. Clear and lucid ones. Like a little nest. Where’d the sun go, into short sentences. Darling I must have a larger book to write in, and a larger space to move in so why don’t you come down here. I can get you to say hell, shit, piss, fuck, darling, bull-shit, cock, prick; so, why don’t you come down here like a common abbreviation etc. How dolphins can stand to be alone, throwing up all the time; someone says, they eat so indiscriminately—I can’t live without you, no matter who you are. No matter means I think.
32
What a tragic figure I pose in the mirror, high and not drunk, my reddish hair all wild, my eyes apparent black in that mirror and full of fear, legs seen walking through the slits in the side of an embroidered purple gown, the subject of the own movie. Wish I could see you now. We went out for the Sunday Times, 4 o’clock. I enjoyed feeling like the whore I was taken for the last time I wore skirts. I had my purple gown on, it kept shifting under my coat so you could see even moving more of my leg above the boot. To enhance it, as we left the building, there was a cop standing outside. So, I made sure to slam the outside door which is usually locked after 10:30 real hard, for him. He shifted his position, after turning to take a look at us coming down the hall. When we got back the two cop cars were in front of the Club 82. I was sure, if the cop had still been there, he’d be surprised to see us return in eight minutes with the Times. We weren’t going out.
33
All the secrets people keep
Consider this a sleep. This sleep. Is temporary as Shakespeare.
34
And I dream a man is carrying a woman up a stairs and from some memory forgotten of the rest of the dream I know the woman is me.
35
Then dreams boycott me. My Puerto Rican friends blow up banks! Fuck! No, I do without sex. No sex. “Your bed looks like a nest.” “What do you do for sex?”
Dream: “I sleep with Dash.”
“I’m talking about us.”
Dream: “Silence.”
“Are you scared?”
Dream: “Yes.” Dream is crazy.
(Britte’s grandfather (Germany) molested her continuously, then she blackmailed him happily.) I sleep with books. I will continue to sleep with books and not waste paper and make love to you. If you’ll let me, drunk at eight in the morning, with normal people slamming doors cause they’ve got coffee, suck you off. And I’ll continue to love you with a barrage of language, what else. It might even make you impotent, or then, me too, what then? Sleep with books. Take chances. Sleep between the lines in your own nest, audience. No mere hesitation halters you, the halyards, whole, sound, healthily and haul, lower the flag easily by tackle in the yard within my golden cloth robe. Take chances. Speak in sun’s tongues.
36
So I dream tranquilizers keep the world in some strange shape like the phone company building. Do they love words? Heritance, Hermaphrodite, Hermes, Political. “Hang him.” “Hang her.” Cover the breast, bare the shoulders, bare the back and hang em. It’s the same meaning, how do you make a flag. Take my word for it, it’s an axe. A flag is an axe and if it isn’t, then most flags have axes on them. A flag is limp, hangs loosely, it’s a slab of stone, cut turf, a weakened form of flake, a scourge. My dictionary crumbles, it flutters (I’m afraid you’re losing interest in me), it becomes the leaf of a plant, a sun still shining in, like an iris or a sweet-flag with sword-shaped leaves and yellow flowers must end with more love. Must write it down—I can get it from my nest or from those thoughts. Here—I’ll look in the mirror where cloth hair lingers and wild hair goes, seeps in to your look as of my glass eyes, always wet, an embarrassment to me and to men and women of all kinds. Look me in the eye, no. Look eye in the sun, no. Sleep long and in your bed, I will make the shapes of many pages for you and share, and then, when you wake up, I will stare. And then, when you wake up I will stare. Eyes already open already stare.
37
So sun. So sun and mention sun. And so fear, you so close in here, so mention fear, must fit in. You for years. Three years, maybe. It makes noises, hissing noises, when it explodes.
38
Don’t dream, don’t even sleep. So, make up a dream. So, I pretend I dreamed: there’s a woman on this beautiful day who enters the room and makes my plants go backwards. She takes away the sun. A man comes in and takes her patch of sun on the wall without entering, which is really mine. Something about the sea. She makes a big thing of the door and on entering enters first with her belly stretched on canvas. It’s so easy. We eat forced to become tea, weak tea. Australia maybe, a place where there’s a house, a thousand dollars. Your muscles tense then and you won’t drink whiskey. The people you are ignoring pretend to speak but their voices only imitate colors. The people you see swimming in the sea are always the same people—they just move up as you walk along the shore. You think you are smoking and are afraid to fall asleep, you feel between your fingers but there is no cigarette. You no longer want to sleep. Heavy eyes. Heavy ship at sea. Heavy ceiling. All on you. You are working on thin air.
39
I expect them now, the wakers and disturbers.
They’ll happen when I don’t.
So come by.
40
in the interim I’ll sleep, as the thoughts occur to you, design thought that I know how, and, as intelligently as I can, hear a door open and close, willingly, let me know then, how you will ever select, transpose and transmit, the even dream, the long dream, the science dream, the song from the dream. Embrace the dream. My embracing you.
As, the breath was so exhausted from my lungs, that I could go no farther; and seated myself at the first arrival.
And someone said then: Free yourself, for sitting down or under cover, men come not into fame
Without which who consumes his life, leaves such vestige of self on earth as smoke in air or foam in water
So conquer breath in time with the mind if with its heavy body it sinks not down
My embracing you.
October 29
At 4:56 p.m., 24 objects were put on the table, it was a memory experiment. All the suspects were present in the room, I had committed the murder and confessed. I was used to memory experiments and experiments of this sort. The night air hung like an American flag crime-dream glove-axe. This was Fern’s experiment.
“Have you been long without eating?” Florence had asked me. Her arms were stretched forward, two hands clasped around her right knee, balancing the leg in air. At least what was visible. The other leg touched the rock she was on. As a Tibetan, before water, she was facing away from the leg that was clasped and balanced. This was motive, something split.
“Can we use this?” I asked Stanislaus. He stopped fingering his doubloon, rubbing it the way a junkie holds his passport at customs. “Can we use this?” I repeated. “It’s about as good as your father’s pickup sticks,” he said to me, “with you in jail.”
“That’s another game,” I said, looking outside. Inside Stanislaus was taking out his collection of philosophical medallions and arranging them over a giant tetrahedron, hung in the center of the room like the one in the Hall of the Bear.
I thought of the belts and necklaces that seem to replace the female body when it is no longer living but they are on it. I was working by force, I was told what to do.
“The sticks are delicate,” I told him, “they can’t support the weight of the jewels.” No one had said anything yet but me and not a few people seemed angry or disgruntled. Someone bangs on the table. I realize I have stolen someone else’s crime and their rage is justified because the crime’s done. Mine is complete then. I ask around the table for identification. I demand it. Someone says, “The red scarf can break the flowerpot.” I can’t remember any more. I realize I am no longer the center of attention. I think “The crime’s too expected, it’s been done before.” The red scarf, the flowerpot, it’s something to consider. It’s new, it doesn’t belong to me, I never would’ve thought of it.
The purpose of a memory experiment is to keep you out of jail. In skirts, if we had more room, it wouldn’t seem like prison, I’m beginning to hate them. Only 24 objects, in my space, with cell-mates. Right on target. She expected the light to go out. They let her keep her doubloon. She hears some fingers behind her back, stealing stuff. She thinks they’re wrathful deities, detaining her at the door, dull childhood Indians who are emperors interrupting our every thought. You have to have a cell-mate unless you’re in solitary. You get in solitary at random, rehabilitation follows at random, whatever you need—spiced deities, professional thieves, medical treatment—ten years in the hospital in fact—and training at the racetrack, customs or just customs, memory exercises, compassionate psychiatric care. She hears small fingers, she hears her own back, dead Egyptians with two Chinese guardians at the entrance to their tomb, these people are all so decadent. Even food if you want it. The sense of memory is abolishing hunger, in her, not in her. In the cell with one small table after the cloth chairs were taken away and someone’s just said to me, It’s better than slitting your wrists. And then someone else: “What about the sticks?” And then someone says, “I know the source of the migraines, it’s too much crying.”
Someone says, “I won’t say anything about it,” and someone dreams a large potentially professional crime emerges in the morning while you are still asleep with those hands behind your back stealing things, I mean, fingers.
The spirit of memory lies in continuing like Giordano Bruno to count the objects in a room and to connect them, to connect with each one some grouping or category in memory, doing this methodically so that eventually the room and all its objects will contain and provoke an impression in the mind of all the knowledge of the universe. I call on all female…and keeping this knowledge, the knowledge from the room continuously in mind, not only will you be able to commit the perfect crime, you will have committed it already, and to memory, and then, follows, the assertion of memory which is magic, or a forewarning of crime leading to just beginning again, like, reading minds.
October 30
Drink more tea.
November 1
I swallowed my sunglasses twice in two parts. The minister vs. the politician who ate the minister in seven parts. Seven for the burial, seven for the mound: a minister’s toys and so on. They apologized for the meal on the train but then they tried to take it away too fast anyway, poor Fern.
And from the train moving slowly along the shoreline, we see: “All the people in the water are the same,” they just move. I’m being thrown in the water too but I’m protecting something, maybe my watch, like my watch.
November 3
I did drink more tea. Been angry with Belial and everyone else since Friday just for staying in the water and just moving. So I caught Meg’s tonsillitis and got sick just for the sake of staying in the water and only moving and dreamed Belial became demanding and venal, demanding love from me but bringing his whole “class” over too and then wanting a real kiss and finally when we do start to kiss, and they are all watching, I feel something and wake up feeling that the arm that felt so comforting and large at my neck was only an angry muscle knot and then I’m hot and I’m cold, I’m depressed and angrier than before, I’m unbearably unloved and get no sympathy, I’m going to have to move again but nobody knows all about it and I won’t tell, I’m hot and cold and I don’t have my bearings, I’m half over even, all of this applies to you too, I too am afraid it will all disappear at any moment.
Nothing will disappear without me, I will disappear with everything and into the face of it, it doesn’t help to know this, aren’t you glad. I feel like Proust and his endless hating, he didn’t think it would all disappear at all, nor even he. At least I don’t have to make these emotions rational, benign, or peopled. As in a fiction. No more new writing, I make this rule: there can be no more new writing this fiscal year, I’m overcast. For the public, I quality. Nobody deserves it? I don’t go to sleep nor do I have a maid or assistant. I still don’t dream, withholding everything, dream. Easy, considering what you know. Fern doesn’t, will not understand, she has withdrawn almost everything. That I’ll try anything is nothing to be held against me, even being in Who’s Who of American Women, who’s bethought herself to even care? I used to try anything with less fear in my form or my patched something, now I happen to have to take American pills but I still try it all, yet not enough maybe, I don’t shoot up. No more accumulating, even the yeast from the beer, I’m sure now what I mean to do, my accumulated knowledge from which I can “teach” but not yet “relax” gives me back a sense of humor which is only a sense of purpose among the drear academies of this century, and even the best academies seem turgid this year. Though I am still immobile and have pains, flies fly into my ink to die and they die in the coffee too, I have a beautiful hand, a clean hand, and I fly away, then I fly away, the permanent ink, the mysterious getting of the next tickets. Why do the people I see every day write me letters and notes, do they think I’m still that visible and they just rip the shit out of the paper anyway. The process of getting back your energy, is it from them? It won’t disappear, it won’t, as she does.
November 4
Time doesn’t fly in the morning, now I have nothing to do for hours or else I can’t plan it, cheap paper for pen and ink, it won’t take the ink at all, it don’t work. The guy downstairs is playing his trumpet badly, he’s so bad, if I were he, I wouldn’t continue my lessons, he cannot suspend his disbelief in the need for accuracy. I have to write something now that is out of myself, what’s the difference who’s in charge? I thank you, I think I’m afraid to write to some of my friends because of this volatile moment, this moment, with Fern. Some of them, I’m afraid of embarrassing them, or telling them more, which is all I have to tell, than they may even want to know about me. So I put an X on the calendar to mark a day in the future when my visible life will be a little more acceptable, not lesbian or gay, yet surely visible enough to let it go unexplained. I dream I am moot, though pretty. And that my mother and sister and willing other women are quite ugly. I dream I have a brother who takes over the job. The X in the dream is for Sunday death, the death of the father, so suddenly. I dream all this over, and it is. And Woe, should I ever be called Poe. If we were confused, he’d be better off than I. I dream I am proper and I know I need a broom and some ashtrays for Lewis’s party.
